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Wednesday, October 10, 2012

25,000 VIEWS!!! Also....A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Genocide

So actually this whole Nanowrimo ninjas thing had sort of a funny ending. I mean...not "Ha Ha" funny. More like blood-crusted-body-parts-all-over-the-place funny, which I suppose might be "Ha Ha" to people with really creepy senses of humor.

A huge group of Octorians came through the time phase fold weakness right near the studio of Lt. Lambaste and The SciGuy to kick some ass and take some names. This was the response for sending a nuclear warhead disguised as The Pretentitron followed shortly by an army of androgynous elf clones of the warrior named pLink. This Octorian force was no strike team. No, this was a full-on, massive attack battalion sent to definitively wipe out Writing About Writing and establish a beachhead for the destruction of humanity. This was serious business. These Octorians ran right into the ninja army (which I wanted to call Ninjarmy, but was vetoed on) that was hunting the halls of Writing About Writing for me because of what I wrote about Nanowrimo last Monday.

I know what you're thinking: they all killed each other. Just like some comedy movie or something. Oh wouldn't that have been so convenient! The last ninja stabs the last Octorian through right as the Octorian shoots the last ninja in the head. Then it's just up to my newly hired janitor, Michael Dukakis, to do the incredibly massive cleanup. (I guess he's had a rough time since 1988, but I figured that wasn't really important to THIS story.) A few hundred thousand paper towels, and fifty thousand gallons of simple green later, it would be business as usual, and we'd get on with the W.A.W. and talking smack about Nano.

But that's not how it happened. Not even close.

How it happened is that they joined forces. Like the Irish and the Scottish at the battle of Falkirk (in Braveheart--I have no idea if that really happened) They decided they were both trying to destroy Writing About Writing, starting with me, and since I kept weaseling out of destruction and death with these stupid twists of fate, they would do better to pool resources to ensure my demise. So they all formed into a super army of Octorians and ninjas bent on my destruction and tromped down the halls together.

And they started to look for me.

Of course I was hiding in one of my oldest entries, so they weren't going to be able to find me very easily. No one ever really goes back there anymore. However, eventually they would set up a search pattern, close off entries they'd already checked and track me down. It's not like I could avoid them forever. And the guest bloggers and W.A.W. staff can only run the show without me for so long before the whole thing starts to degenerate into entries made entirely of memes, or even worse. Let's not forget the travesty that was Thursday's Three Quotations the day I got kidnapped by men in black and the SciGuy had to do it.

~shudder~

But there was this one ninja who started saying that anyone who didn't support Nano just needed to die. Because Nano was about real writing. Well the Octorians wondered what the heck "Nano" even was. So the ninjas told them. Well, the ninjas didn't know it, but the Octorians weren't JUST here to kill me. They showed up in the first place to exterminate all of humanity for its pretentiousness. And while that was my fault for being totally pretentious...they sort of can't stand it in any of its forms. The Octorians thought that calling 50k word rough drafts "novels" and their writer's "novelists" sounded pretty pretentious. The ninjas got pissed (because no one can say anything bad about Nano...ever....without pissing off Nano ninjas, even if it's KINDA true). Things got heated. There were some unkind words. Everyone was a little tense.

Well....it probably wouldn't have escalated past that. But then one of the Octorians fell to the ground with a ninja star in its head.

And that was pretty much all she wrote.

Ninja stars. Alien blaster fire. The glittering arcs of katana strikes. Limbs and tentacles flying through the air. Arterial spray in vermillion and pale green. And one of those fucking ninjas totally got spleen all over my copy of Mrs. Dalloway. Slowly but surely in a flurry of stealth kills, friendly fire, puffs of disappearing smoke, and sprays of fully automatic energy blasts, the two armies tore each other to ribbons. In the chaos, no one noticed one solitary ninja dive for stealth cover and then completely disengage from the whole battle instead of just moving silently and hiding in shadows to line up another backstab.

Of course what they don't know is that Leela Bruce slipped into the ninja army in a total super-steath, Batman-snatches-the-marble-from-Ra's-Al-Ghul's-hand maneuver, and that she had been a part of the ninja army almost as soon as it reached Writing About Writing. She had been steering them towards the Octorians by suggesting she knew were I would go next, and she was the one who brought up Nano in the first place to start the feud. Pretty much she's the reason they all totally killed each other.

I have some SERIOUSLY competent guest bloggers, even if most of them are insubordinate about pretty much everything.

So see...it took them like ten minutes to kill each other. And it happened out in the hall. And it was because of Leela Bruce's quick thinking, not just convenient comedic timing. Not even CLOSE to just immediately wiping out each other on sight. And Michael Dukakis won't even need several days to clean up the mess since it's in the hallway. He just has to fire up the Writing About Writing zamboni and drive it through the halls a few times--maybe with a sponge or something attached to the blade on the last pass. Hell I'd do it, but I'm not paying him very well--since he's...you know...Michael Dukakis--so I shouldn't steal all the fun parts of the job. He's only going to need a couple dozen rolls of paper towels and a bottle of Simple Green for the touch up.

25,000!

But in happier news--or at least less messy news--this blog has recently crested 25,000 pageviews.

This blog is new, so I'm still only a couple of months out from my eyes popping out when I hit triple digits in a single day. Even though in August I had a single page go "quazi-viral" and picked up 11,000+ hits in just that month, breaking 10,000 was a big deal and things died back down. I honestly thought 25,000 hits might take me a couple of years. But things have just kept growing (and still are), so it came much sooner than I thought it would.

About the Author

Chris Brecheen is just this guy who loves to write. He's been doing it for thirty years, and even got a degree in Creative Writing that now covers a hole in his drywall. These days he focuses his pretentious, hackneyed tripe on this blog, which is two teaspoons magical journey, one cup of advice given as satire, a dash of talking cat, a splash of personified ideals, a (very) healthy dollop of pervy candor, eight heaping tablespoons of toeing the knife-edge line between irreverence and blasphemy, diced guest bloggers who live inside his head (and a couple who don't), a sprinkle of words used pretty much with the express intention of keeping prudes offended in perpetuity, regular Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly references, at least one doomsday plot per season, and a slice of pressed milk curd provided by the weird guy who lives on the third floor. Add three or four sprigs of social justice and simmer.

Best Contemporary Sci-fi

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